Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 86

state monopoly charters that excluded them from trade in certain
overseas markets). The acquisition of property was therefore a major
activity associated with the emergence of a new type of social order.
Moreover, from the point of view of technical innovation and broader
cultural development, the stagnant, narrow and backward character of
economic relations based on personal obligation became a problem. A
new sort of 'property' thus had to come into being if feudalism was to
be superseded by capitalism. Indeed, the protection of private property,
as defined within a bourgeois rights framework, came to be equated
with the goal of universalised justice.
The notion of private property, in the new understanding of the
concept, was closely linked to liberal ideas of 'freedom', 'equality' and
'consent'. It was identified with individual freedom (of mobility, of
labour), with private rights (of conscience, of religion) and the notion
of equality, in that every property owner was seen to be equal to every
other (in that exclusive access, the same rules of trespass, and so on,
applied to all regardless of social and economic background). Property
was no longer tied to obligation - its new foundation was that of self-
interest and individual propriety considerations.
In the specific case of communal lands, control was divested from
the local village level and centralised in the hands of the emergent
nation-state. The landed aristocracy had gained its wealth and power
from ownership and control over agriculture and pastoral industries,
but even so the notion of communal places to hunt, fish and forage was
ingrained by custom. The combined advent of mercantile capitalism
(and attendant notions of private interest and private property) and the
modern nation-state (including the concentration of political power
into bureaucratic institutions that were, in turn, protected by large
bodies of armed men) transformed the relationship between land and
peasant, land and noble, and serf and lord.
For present purposes, the most profound change was the movement
away from the obligations of 'duty' and 'responsibility' to the concept
of the exclusive power to alienate one's possessions in any manner
one desired, without the binds of custom or traditional responsibility.
This shift in the legal and social status of property relations allowed for
several interrelated phenomena (White and Perrone, 2010):
• the commodiication of the countryside: that is, the transformation
of production into commodity production (for example, wool) and
sale of 'privately' owned goods on luxury markets (for example,
pheasant); thereby displacing peasants off the land;